Will the Xbox 360 be able to reduce its price quicker than the PS3?

Granted, the article says that Microsoft is having some problems shrinking their die - but how hard will it be for Sony?

The Xbox is running a custom triple-core PowerPC-based design by IBM - but it's still a Power-PC chip. How hard can it be?

The PS3 is running a never-before-seen chip - the Cell - which is utilized by a small handful of products. The PS3 uses 7 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE) but the chip is designed with 8 (see the picture, above). They omit one to help increase their production. At the current die process of 90nm (the same as the 360's PowerPC chip), it was too costly to create a chip with all 8 working SPEs. The solution would be to hone the production to create a higher-quality chip; instead - and probably for production output reasons - Sony allows one SPE to be broken. How will Sony be able to shrink that process to 65nm if they can't create a fully-functional chip at 90nm? It'll take some doing, is all I'm saying. Hell, Microsoft's parter is having a bitch of a time making it work, and that's with a relatively well-understood chip like the PowerPC!

So, anyway, my point is that Microsoft will have an easier time reducing the cost of the Xbox 360 than Sony will reducing the cost of the PS3. Lower costs may allow for lower prices; which is a potent weapon in any company's arsenal of competition.

This is just my speculation. We'll all see how this plays out.